Junior Atrocities

"Our goal is not only Palmyra or Homs or Damascus, rather our goal is to conquer Bayt al- Maqdes [Jerusalem] and Rome, God willing."
Jihadist, from video The Capture and Assassination of the Nusayri Captain 

There is a scenario in the recently released video from Islamic State where a Syrian pilot delivers a short description of his career in the Syrian air force, as a captain with President Bashar al-Assad's forces. He is shown wearing an orange jumpsuit, kneeling, awaiting the inevitable. And death comes to him at the hands of a young boy who looks around ten years of age. The boy has obviously been carefully tutored to accomplish a dreadful act of murder.


Islamic State is proud of their 'cubs of the Caliphate'. Infamously, photographs emerged showing children of Islamic State terrorists holding aloft the heads of people whom the jihadists murdered in their inimitable way. Now they've gone beyond that. The use of children to shoot captured Syrian soldiers in Palmyra in a staged mass execution is one thing. Now those children appear to have graduated to carrying out beheadings on their own initiative, albeit guided.

Screenshot from the video just before the beheading.

"Then they taught me how to hold the sword, and they told me how to hit. They told me it was the head of the infidels."
"[The trainer] said if I didn't do it, he'd shoot me."
"They ... told us it would make us tougher. They beat us everywhere. I was scared when I saw that [videos of beheadings IS trainers exposed the boys to] I knew I wouldn't be able to behead someone like that. Even as an adult."
Yahya, Yazidi boy captured by Islamic State

Islamic State butchered Yazidi men, enslaving thousands of women and girls when they overran towns in northern Iraq last year. They abducted dozens of young Yazidi boys to convert them to Islam and to transform them into jihadi fighters. In the interests of building a new generation of Islamic State fighters residents who fled their lives under Islamic State in Syria and Iraq describe the process in interviews with Associated Press.

There have been other descriptions of young boys living with their families in towns controlled by Islamic State being conscripted into the ISIS militant ideology as Islamist faithful consecrated to the glories of the past when militant Islam spread its crescent moon message with the aid of the sword. Now boys are being turned into killers and suicide bombers. The most recent ISIL video of last week illustrating the completion of the process when a boy proceeded to behead a Syrian soldier.

An earlier ISIL video released last month showed 25 children impassively performing the function they were taught as junior jihadists: shooting 25 Syrian soldiers who had been captured, aiming for their heads. A match made in hell. Yahya, his younger brother and their mother along with hundreds of Yazidis had been captured when ISIL took the Iraqi town of Sulagh last August. They arrived in Raqqa where Yazidi boys from age 8 to 15 were placed in the Farouq training camp.

Their names were changed to those of Muslim Arabs in place of the Kurdish names they were given at birth. Yahya spend five months at the camp engaged eight to ten hours a day in training before he escaped ISIS along with his brother and his mother. Exercises, weapons drills and Quranic studies were the order of his days at the camp. He was taught that "dirty" Yazidis deserve to be killed and he was shown how to shoot someone at close range.

AP

In this photo released on April 25, 2015, by a militant website, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, young boys known as the "lion cubs" hold rifles and Islamic State group flags as they exercise at a training camp in Tal Afar, near Mosul, northern Iraq.

A Farouq camp video has surfaced of boys in camouflage performing calisthenics and shouting ISIL slogans. In the video, an ISIL fighter states that the boys have been inducted into jihad so that "in the coming days God Almighty can put them in the front lines to battle the infidels."

Less spoken of is the Hamas Iran-proxy militia recognized as a terrorist group, which has been ruling Gaza and the Palestinians living there, with its Iranian-approved charter calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. Hamas as well, like any good terrorist group inculcates in its young dependents a hatred for Israel and Jews, infusing them with the passion of revenge that propels them into future action. This is their very specific jihad.

Hamas has set up 'summer camps' to augment the lessons learned through the Palestinian school curricula used by both Gaza and the West Bank that 'Palestine', which was always a Jewish homeland, was in the reality recognized by Arabs, an homeland for the Palestinians which have been, in the imagination of Arabs, Arab, not Jewish, despite historical inaccuracy. In those summer camps Palestinian Gazan youth are taught the use of combat arms and pledged to join the battle.

Lest anyone forget, it might be useful to recall that in the last years of the 8-year Iran-Iraq war, the Ayatollahs ordered young Iranian boys to martyr themselves, sending them into the field of battle to clear the way by setting off the improvised explosive devices so the armed and seasoned mature Iranian fighters could proceed in attacking the Iraqi fighters.

They chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ and they keep coming, and we keep shooting, sweeping our machine guns around like sickles. My men are eighteen, nineteen, just a few years older than these kids. I’ve seen them crying, and at times the officers have had to kick them back to their guns. Once we had Iranian kids on bikes cycling towards us, and my men all started laughing, and then these kids started lobbing their hand grenades and we stopped laughing and started shooting.
Iraqi officer

 It's estimated that 100,000 Iranian children from age 8 up went into battle, a plastic key to paradise around their necks, Ayatollah Khomeini personally having assured them that their death would result in honour for their country, their names forever in blessed memory, and their after-life pleasures in paradise well earned. But only if they volunteered themselves as mine-clearers. Nothing so illustrates the indomitable will of the ayatollahs as their betrayal of Iranian children.

In which case, we can take our pick from among the Islamic State's ideological conquest resulting in their caliphate, using atrocities to gain 'respect' and 'honour' in the world of fanatical Islam, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, with its inexorable push toward nuclear arms, convincing the international community that peace, and only peace absorbs their interests; all else is slanderous misinterpretation courtesy of the Zionist invaders.

Islamic State recruits from among teens and children with the use of gifts, by threats and through brainwashing. In schools and mosques the militants enthuse children instilling extremist doctrine to turn them against their own parents. In the streets, fighters befriend children, giving them toys. And the process begins and ends with ISIL training camps turning out child fighters for the "caliphate".

AP

In this photo released on Jan. 14, 2015, by a militant website, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, Syrian boys, left, follow an Islamic State militant, right, holding his group's flag, during a street preaching session in al-Tabqa in Raqqa province, northeast Syria.

The Islamic Republic of Iran used pride and persuasion to pressure Iranian boys that they would bring glory to the country and honour to their families by choosing voluntarily to offer themselves as martyrs. Their reward would not be the paltry gifts that Islamic State hands to Yazidi children to elicit their juvenile cooperation, but their elevation to paradise where, like the mature men who preceded them all honour would be accorded them, along with nubile virgins' ministrations.

Which is the more demonstrably barbaric? It's a match.